Murray-Darling Basin Authority — River Stories

The Murray–Darling Basin (MDBA) contains Australia’s largest river system, spanning 3,780km in length and extending across 14% of Australia’s landmass. The River Stories website features people, their lives and their connection with the basin. It provides history in parallel with key political events around changing perspectives on water and the environment.

MDBA wanted to build the resulting collection of stories and rich media, in a responsive and interactive way.

The audience for this project is diverse and scales from the broader public, to people living on the rivers, to an enthusiast or someone with a vested interest in the Basin. The site therefore needed to be engaging with content structured to speak to all audiences.

User Experience and responsiveness

Our initial approach was to build a static HTML site as it was thought content wouldn't be changing. Focusing on user experience and responsiveness, we broke up content into 5 themed areas, while taking advantage of the rich emotive imagery and video to tell the story.

Features

In-house content editing

Having built the site in a specific way, we had to alter the existing front-end code and integrate with a Drupal back-end without compromising the visual design for the project’s phase 2. Our solution allows the MDBA to edit and create content on 99% of the site without developer assistance.

Our collaboration with the MDBA has resulted in a beautiful site which brings the past into present conversation, and allows people to consider issues from different periods to understand how the Murray Darling Basin is where it is today.